Iain Lane
Principal Software Engineer at Chainguard
Nottingham, England, United Kingdom
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolIain Lane is a Principal Software Engineer with 17 years' experience building and operating platform and desktop infrastructure, currently driving platform work at Chainguard. He blends hands-on engineering with technical leadership, having run CI/CD, cloud platform, and release teams at Grafana Labs and Canonical while mentoring squads to ship reliable systems. A long-standing Debian and Ubuntu developer, he has deep expertise in Linux packaging, release engineering, and distro-wide CI across multiple architectures. His open-source contributions include bug fixes and stability improvements to GNOME/glib and gnome-shell and Kubernetes-focused tooling for Grafana’s jsonnet libraries, reflecting fluency from low-level C issues to cloud-native deployments. Known for improving team dynamics as much as code quality, he frequently bridges upstream fixes with downstream releases to reduce long-term maintenance burden. Based in Nottingham, he combines pragmatic systems thinking with a sustained commitment to Free Software and cross-project collaboration.
18 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
BSc (Hons), Computer Science, BSc (Hons), Computer Science at University of Nottingham
Stackoverflow
176reputation
2kreached
0answers
3questions
Github Skills (40)
gobject10
debugging10
kubernetes10
javascript10
observability10
c1110
dbus10
glib10
c1710
regular-expression10
prometheus10
gnome10
jsonnet10
kubernetes-pods10
systemd10
Programming languages (24)
Github contributions (5)
GNOME/glib
Jun 2015 - Mar 2021
Read-only mirror of https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:62 commits in 5 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Iain's contributions primarily involve debugging and improving the GLib library, focusing on signal handling, and regular expression functionalities. They fixed bugs related to signal disconnection, crash prevention in signal operations, and the correct behavior of regular expressions with different PCRE versions. The user also addressed issues in file system operations related to trashing and overlayfs, as well as improvements in GDateTime and GDBus tool functionalities. Their work included fixes related to memory management and code correctness, contributing to the overall stability of the library.
glibgnome
grafana/jsonnet-libs
Nov 2021 - Apr 2022
Grafana Labs' Jsonnet libraries
Role in this project:DevOps Engineer
DevOps EngineerContributions:10 reviews, 6 commits, 8 PRs in 5 months
Contributions summary:Iain focused on improving the configuration and functionality of the `jsonnet-libs` project, specifically related to the integration with Kubernetes. They addressed the configuration of the `node-exporter` by allowing the namespace to be configured. The user added a startup probe to the prometheus ha-mixin to allow prometheus to start properly. The user also updated the kube-state-metrics configuration. These changes suggest an involvement in optimizing the deployment and monitoring of Kubernetes applications.
grafanajsonnetmonorepoobservabilityprometheus
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